Digital First Media – Top Stories Photo Widget

An important metric measured by news sites is user engagement, namely the time a user spends on a site. News site analytics also show that users frequently access articles directly from search engines – so how do you increase user engagement in that situation?

One solution was to dynamically display each site’s top stories in a visually appealing image rotator that provided a link to each top story.

For this project I performed the following tasks:

Prototyped the widget appearance using Adobe CS.

Modified the PHP template that processed Top News RSS feeds so the resulting JavaScript created widget rendered correctly.